Delights 2016

The range of lounge music encompasses beautiful music-influenced instrumentals, modern electronica with chillout, and downtempo influences, while remaining thematically focused on its retro-space-age cultural elements. Beautiful music initially offered soft and unobtrusive instrumental selections on a very structured schedule with limited commercial interruptions. It often functioned as a free background music service for stores, with commercial breaks consisting only of announcements aimed at shoppers already in the stores. A culture surrounding chill-out music has evolved, with many fashionable bars and clubs, designed with a retro or retro-futuristic ambience, devoted to the genre.

Inga Swearingen's highly anticipated fourth album, Let Me Call This Home speaks of the yin and yang pull of home, having a longing for it, and wanting to leave it to ultimately come home again.

“Shakespeare has been a part of my life as a performer from the very start” says Ian Bostridge, “Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream and Ades's The Tempest have been milestones for me as a singer. It has been a great joy to rediscover the music in Shakespeare's incomparable texts and the music that has been written over the past four centuries toclothe them, from the simplest songs of his own contemporaries, through the melodic delights of the likes of Haydn, Britten and Finzi to the matchless complexity of the late Stravinsky. Working again with Tony Pappano has been a joy; and making my first recording with a long term musical partner, lutenist Liz Kenny, a particular pleasure.”

Sterns once again delights with a two-disc collection of East African infectiousness that defies words. Tracks spanning the decade between 1972-82 fill these discs, and since curator, liner-note writer, and London DJ John Armstrong has already been spinning stuff like this for decades, his choices are, well, choice.

Hear the document of one man’s passion crossing over into obsession. Chicago radio disc jockey and soul archivist Bob Abrahamian was deeply devoted to celebrating and documenting unknown Chicagoland group harmony music. Upon his untimely passing in 2014, he left behind hundreds of radio programs and a daunting collection of 35,000 carefully-selected 45s. Our collection borrows its title from Abrahamian’s long-running and acclaimed WHPK radio show, and it spins a tale that’s cautionary, inspiring, and set to the sounds of the impossible-to-find tracks that made Bob Abrahamian’s on-air playlist and animated the radio programs that were his life’s work. Collected here are 16 artists featured on Sitting In The Park, in their own words and through the lens of our friend Bob.

A world might seem to divide the unbridled Romanticism of Berlioz from the highly controlled Late Baroque art of Rameau. However, separated by less than a century, the same passion links these two works that prove more similar than their stylistic divergence might suggest. There is the same audacity in orchestration, combined with an innate sense of drama that springs repeated rhythmic and harmonic surprises. The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra shows its versatility under Daniel Harding, who posses a matchless gift for establishing a dialogue between these two pioneering geniuses.

Motion Drive was formed in 2006, after toying with other projects such as Blue Vortex and Rumble Pack, and can be easily identified for the pumping melodic and yet progressive sounds of the trips he paves. Motion Drive joined the Iono-Music family in 2009 and released his debut album in 2010 - 'In the Dirt'. That first solo album can already give you an indication of the eclectic artistic manoeuvres he creates and the wide range of electronic beats he can master.

Westworld: Season 1 (Music from the HBO® Series) is a 34-song collection that features the most poignant musical moments from the ten-episode first season.

Magic Peterson Sunshine is an indispensable compilation for the European jazz lover. It is the culmination of tireless archival digging by London-based DJ and audiophile Gilles Peterson, whose obsession with the German label MPS (née SABA) has resulted in this handpicked treasure trove of material. The label has near-mythic roots, founded as it was deep in the heart of Germany's Black Forest by the reclusive Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, a.k.a. HGBS, whose house concerts and personal studio captured and released some of the most forward-thinking jazz of the 1960s. With over 500 recordings to his credit, a catalog surpassed only by producer Manfred Eicher of ECM Records in Munich, this is the merest slice of one astronomical pie.